Introduction

More Alaska voters than ever are voting by mail or in early voting this year. This page tracks the numbers as reported by the state.

The data come from the Alaska Division of Elections website It’s a 10-page pdf, so I ran a script using tabula-py to extract the data. Additional summary information is available here.I have republished the data here, where you can download the reports from each day. I had a google sheet that was updating automatically, but that kept breaking. Other caveats: this involves getting reports from all across the state, so there are probably reporting delays.

If you see any errors, contact Ben Matheson. Disclaimer - this may not be fully accurate or up to date. It also may break at any time. This is not official or affiliated with anything…enjoy!

Statewide Early Vote + Mail Ballots Sent, Received, and Rejected

These are the raw numbers for ballots sent to mail voters, ballots receieved, and early votes that were accepted.

Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Received Percent Received Mail Ballots Rejected
119,375 80,319 67.28% 302

Note: these numbers should match what the state has published here.

Overall Early and Mail Vote Compared to 2016

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters and Received by State

Vote By Mail per Alaska House District

Early Voting Totals Per House District.

Early voting started Monday, October 19th. Here are the raw totals of votes in each Alaska House District.

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters, Received by State, and Rejected

District Number District Mail Ballots Received Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Rejected Early Vote in Person
28 South Anchorage 4449 6192 11 1763
24 Anchorage - Oceanview 3178 4611 6 1535
14 Eagle River/Chugach State Park 3168 4437 15 471
33 Downtown Juneau/Douglas/Haines/ Skagway 3130 5024 7 2294
21 West Anchorage 3033 4335 10 1498
26 Anchorage - Huffman 2981 4315 9 1520
27 Anchorage - Basher 2851 4112 7 1223
22 Anchorage - Sand Lake 2763 4047 5 1216
34 Mendenhall Valley 2627 4076 12 3355
31 Homer/South Kenai 2579 4173 8 29
25 Anchorage - Abbott 2551 3848 9 1332
20 Anchorage - Downtown 2550 3740 7 1491
18 Anchorage - Spenard 2528 3696 19 1364
04 Western Fairbanks 2435 3509 6 1950
16 Anchorage - College Gate 2346 3399 9 983
35 Sitka/Petersburg 2211 3273 6 25
17 Anchorage - University 2150 3137 4 1077
29 North Kenai 2031 3049 9 37
12 Chugiak/Gateway 2008 3033 9 1802
23 Anchorage - Taku 1975 3022 10 1033
10 Rural Mat-Su 1970 2773 8 1575
11 Greater Palmer 1946 2689 14 2801
05 Chena Ridge/Airport 1824 2712 6 1505
13 Fort Richardson/North Eagle River 1824 2665 5 345
06 Eielson/Denali/Upper Yukon/Border Region 1763 2410 3 457
09 Richardson Hwy/East Mat-Su 1741 2574 9 1301
30 Kenai/Soldotna 1668 2781 7 11
07 Greater Wasilla 1523 2275 5 2552
01 Downtown Fairbanks 1503 2140 6 1093
08 Big Lake/Point Mackenzie 1458 2236 6 1773
36 Ketchikan/Wrangell/Metlakatla/Hydaburg 1441 2204 16 5
19 Anchorage - Mountainview 1438 2170 5 607
15 Elmendorf 1428 2209 11 549
32 Kodiak/Cordova/Seldovia 1309 2354 2 27
03 North Pole/Badger 1140 1695 3 908
02 Fairbanks/Wainwright 1061 1495 3 720
37 Bristol Bay/Aleutians/Upper Kuskokwim 698 1194 8 42
38 Lower Kuskokwim 386 653 0 9
39 Bering Straits/Yukon Delta 306 524 3 348
40 Arctic 304 540 4 17
99 NA 44 54 0 0

Mail Voting Relative to Voter Registration and Voter Turnout per House District

For each Alaska House district, I have the number of registered voters (as of October 3, this report). You can see which districts are seeing more take-up of mail voting relative to their voter base. Additional this compares the 2020 completed mail ballots to the full 2016 election turnout.

This is not really finished yet. Also I just made up the regional labels.

Partisan Explanation on Vote by Mail

This looks at the relationship between relative vote-by-mail activity and voting results from the 2016 presidential election. The y axis is the percentage of mail votes returned relative to the total 2016 turnout. The x axis and color is the margin by which Donald Trump won or lost the district in 2016. The basic trend you see is that the redder the disrict, the less vote-by-mail there is, so far. The key exception is western Alaska (in the lower left), which voted for Clinton but is not seeing much vote-by-mail participation yet.

Voting Method Breakdown by House District

Mail and Online Rejections Per House District

About

The Alaska Division of Elections data is originally is published in a 10-page PDF that I parsed to extract the data. This uses a combination of R and Python. The Python uses Tabula to pull out the data. After that, an R script cleans out extra spaces, gaps, and labels the rows by house district and adds descriptions. I wanted to do everything in R, but I couldn’t get rJava loaded for the Tabulizer, so the tabula-py library ended up being more expedient.

This page is an RMarkdown document that calculates some summary stats, like percent rejected and then displays the data in several ggplot2 plots. The PDF parsing in particular may be brittle and this could definitely break at anytime.